Playwrighting Workshops at Bay Area Playwrights Festival "Voice is the nout of it character is an expression of voice, the emotional tone underneath. If a writer is totally connected with the voice it will be in the words." Difference between character/destiny and personality/the way you play your roles. GOOD QUOTES on playwriting process "But of contacting in ourselves the elements-forces and tendencies-that are characters. Gives him little notepads. Comment on notebooks and journals. Dozen drafts of True West. SS begins to direct his own plays out of an increasing dissatisfaction with "people laying ideas on his work and from wanting to let the charcters speak for themselves not be interpreted...SS is very unpsychological about those characters-they are who they are." Story of Ruby Cohn class and how Shep got the image of the cat and the eagle from a comic book. GOOD in interview with Scott Wren...cowboy logic. "Certain point you get to with him and beyond that it's just a mystery as to what's going on. He really is a cowboy...simple, unassuming, without putting anything on anything..."
JULY, 1980 True West at Magic Theatre directed by Robert Woodruff with SF Mime Troupe veterans, Peter Coyote and Jim Hayne. From pressure from the Pulitzer and the hottest American playwright...SS rewrites True West more than any other play... "I disagree, his motive is also aesthetic."
"after Buried Child I wanted to simplify, to refine and distill..." True West is in the mind, in the soul."
Good son/Bad son, good eye/bad eye, Cain and Abel. To integrate contrasting images of masculinity. To be a manautobiographical(?) references. "I never intended the play to be a documentary of my personal life. It's always a mixture. But iI can't get away from, certaim [erspma; e;e,emts.(?) I don't want to get away from certain personal elements that you use as hooks in a certain way. The further I get away from those personal things the more in the dark I am...l Tooth of Crime story...Autobiography. The basic truth of True West transcends its autobio impulse the emotion that each man has to face the other side of himself...chief obsesson of Bruce Springsteen...by internalizing the conflict SS steers clear of facile Freudianism and soap opera sentimentality..."SS about double nature...split in much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal..."
Shepard was at rehearsals for the Magic production Roberto Duran-Sugar Ray Leonard fight...
Robert Coe plays golf while preparing NYT Magazine Nov. 23 1980. Goes to the Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Durand fight with Woodruff. Woodruff used the fight to coach the actors in True West.
Goes to rodeos with a partner named Slim. Cowboys a more authentic way of life. Visits Warren Beatty to get advice on his film career. Get Swifty Lazar- a box of screenplays but swamped with offers for acting roles. Coe: SS says the 60's were crazy and calls Tooth of Crime "totally irresponsible-crazy wacked out violent just heaving a bunch of baboons out into the street." Secret retiring personality. Mystery in American life "lies between men not between men and women. Men are more interesting."
October 1980 Raggedy Man begins shooting in Texas.
SS is on location in Texas and he writes an outraged statement "I would like it to be known that the production of my play True West at the Public Theatre is in no way a representation of my intentions or of Robert Woodruff's." Turns down O'Neill in Reds and Urban Cowboy and Brubaker to be in Raggedy Man with Spacek and Eric Roberts written by William Wittliff who will write Country and Coal Miner's Daughter and directed by Jack Fisk, her husband coming home and not being recognized. SS "I want to do a kind of Japanese character with this guy. Like the Kurosawa films where characters are like apparitions. They don't speak but they have this whole physical thing." Creates a character bio with bugs collected from his radiator.
Also working on the screenplay for Fritzcarraldo by Werner Herzog who visits him on the set.
December 23, 1980 True West at New York Shakespeare Festival. Directed by Robert Woodruff replaced by Joe Papp.
True West saga at the Public Theatre.
True West is the first play I truely lived up to. Rewrote it13 time REVISION.
Feingold comment on the problem. SS just wanted to repudiate the production. SS is working on Rageddy Man and can't get to NY to help out. SS begins to direct his own work from here on out.
Resurrection directed by Daniel Petrie into movie theatres. SS father sees the movie and writes that he liked it and in Days he just seemed like Steve but in Resurrection he was a real actor. Sex symbol Playgirl named SS as one of the ten sexiest men in America with Sen. Gary Hart, Willie Nelson, Tom Brokaw, Billy Dee Williams and Bob Seger.
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